All posts tagged gothic

What did I study in your School of Night?
When your mouth’s first unfathomable yes
Opened your body to be my book, I read
My answers there and learned the spell aright,
Yet, though I searched and searched, could never guess
What spirits it raised nor where their questions led.

Those others, familiar tenants of your sleep,
The whisperers, the grave somnambulists
Whose eyes turn in to scrutinize their woe,
The giant who broods above the nightmare steep,
That sleeping girl, shuddering, with clenched fists,
A vampire baby suckling at her toe,

They taught me most. The scholar held his pen
And watched his blood drip thickly on the page
To form a text in unknown characters
Which, as I scanned them, changed and changed again:
The lines grew bars, the bars a Delphic cage
And I the captive of his magic verse.

A vampire, not a Woman, a Thing obscene.
Eyes hideous as the eyes of a hired Whore,
She, Herod’s Wife, enters upon the scene.
Beside her stands a tall and sexless thing,
With the fig-leaf that has of fig-leaves four,
Always her sexless sex remembering,
A mask she wears; naked enough, for once,
She has her Exit through the open door.
There’s a wise owl; a wise man that’s a dunce
Reads in a book Salome. Let that pass.
As for this creature that’s Herodias,
Nero’s Agrippina she might have been.
“Make the way for the Tetrarch Antipas!”
Cries Herod, before he enters on the scene.